Peter Chianca: Above and beyond the call of doggies

Tuesday

Sep 2, 2014 at 2:08 PMSep 2, 2014 at 2:09 PM

By Peter ChiancaMore Content Now

You may recall me mentioning how we have four dogs in our household, which you’d think would be enough. But my wife, Theresa, is of the opinion that you can never have too many dogs around, and once you’ve got two dogs you might as well have 10. This despite the fact that with 10 dogs you have a much higher chance of being trampled on the way to the refrigerator.

We’re not going to adopt more dogs, because that would be weird -- in my mind, the difference between four and five dogs is the difference between “whimsically eccentric” and “does your house always smell like this?” (A lot of people would say that’s the difference between one dog and any larger number of dogs, but whatever.)

So instead, we’ve taken to watching our friends’ dogs when they go away -- but as it turns out, the visitor dogs all tend to have their own little idiosyncrasies. Or in some cases big idiosyncrasies, as we found out last week with our latest guest, a golden retriever named Brady, who loves water.

That’s actually an understatement: It would be more accurate to say that Brady has a water problem; to Brady, water is like crack. Once Brady is in the water he sees no reason to get out of the water, ever, even if it means eventually passing out from exhaustion and sinking to the bottom, never to be seen again. This is why dogs aren’t known as great forward-thinkers -- you don’t see many dog event planners, for instance.

So as a result, when we’re taking Brady out with our dogs, we try to avoid water completely. But we made the mistake of bringing the dogs to a soccer field near our house -- soccer fields are notoriously dry, but it turns out if you run through the woods next to this particular soccer field, and down a hill, and across a path, and down a ravine, you’ll find yourself in waist-high swampwater.

And by “you” I mean “me,” since I was the one who chased Brady on that very route when he apparently sniffed out the swamp and took off.

Of course, just reaching a dog in the middle of a swamp you’ve just waded into in your jeans and Nikes is only a small part of the battle when the dog doesn’t want to leave. (“Sweet, sweet water!” you could almost hear him thinking as he paddled away, me tromping after him through the gooey underbrush like Adrienne Barbeau in “Swamp-Thing,” sort of.)

Somehow I was eventually able to slip a leash on him and coax him slowly back to shore without being sucked to death by giant leeches, or turned into the Swamp-Thing (see previous paragraph). To Theresa’s credit, she stopped laughing as much when it looked like the dog and I might completely disappear into the muck -- let’s face it, losing both of us down there would have been pretty hard to explain to authorities.

So once we got Brady up the ravine, across the path, over the hill and back onto the soccer field, my son -- who finds the fact that we occasionally house “strange” dogs even weirder than the fact that we have four of our own -- was fairly disgusted that I’d gone in after him. He’s of the opinion that if you love someone you should set them free, and if you don’t love someone you REALLY should set them free.

And maybe next time I’d be tempted to call the fire department so they could come out in their taxpayer-funded hip waders and do the dirty work. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop taking dogs in for visits -- despite all the barking and near-drownings and tramplings, I can’t deny that having a pack around certainly keeps things interesting.

And yes, my house always smells like this.

A version of this column was posted on Pete’s Pop Culture, Parenting & Pets Blog at northofboston.wickedlocal.com/section/blogs. Follow Peter Chianca on Twitter at @pchianca.

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